The only cassette I remember owning for myself was the soundtrack to [1987's] The Chipmunk Adventure. The gist of the movie was that the Chipmunks end up outside the immediate control of their caretaker, and find their way into a hot air balloon and travel around the world. I didn't actually listen to most of the soundtrack-- it was a lot of pop covers done with high-pitched voices that I wasn't particularly interested in. I listened to the title theme over and over again, though. At that time, I attached the sounds of the cassette with the romanticism and sentimentality of the movie that appealed to me as a five-year-old, and that's why it was important to me.

It was just around the point when my family got a CD player, and The Sign by Ace of Base was the first CD I got at that age. Everyone had that album. My parents had a piano, and I learned to play the melodies from some of those songs around then-- that was the only stuff I was interested in learning on the piano. At some point, my dad may have taken the CD from me because he really liked it and wanted to listen to it, which never happens with music.

I was in ninth grade, and I learned about the first Clash album through one of my friends at school. That really got me interested in writing my own music and gave me some direction. I never thought I'd want to do anything with music beyond playing in school orchestra until I started playing guitar in eighth grade, and then in ninth grade I started writing my own songs and playing around town with people.

My experience with that album is kind of almost cliché, but it was the first album I identified with on a level that wasn't just music existing as static on a CD. It was more about my engagement with it as a listener. In terms of its lyrical content, the album got me interested in history class; before that, I thought that whatever I was learning in eighth grade history class was irrelevant. It clued me into other political things. I loved the music too, but [the political lyrics] were really important to me. Ultimately, listening to music like that and thinking about music socially is why I pursued studying music as an advanced study to begin with.

Pussy Whipped was an album that meant a lot to me for a whole bunch of reasons. I was in college at Washington, D.C.'s George Washington University. Talking about the lyrics on that album in college had me thinking about things I hadn't thought about before. I was taking gender studies courses, and it was part of the reason why I liked the riot grrrl movement. Those courses were what made me want to study social sciences rather than music, which was my original major.

Pitchfork: The Clash, Bikini Kill, noise shows-- the music that you make now doesn't sound much like any of that stuff.

No, it totally doesn't. Part of that is the technical limitations of living in an apartment building and not being able to make all the sounds I want to make-- my music is very quiet for that reason. I have been consistently trying new things with how I approach the instruments I play, but at this point, I've sort of returned to the way I learned to play them, to my jazz guitar lessons and stuff like that.

I had first heard Michael Hurley's First Songs working at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington, D.C., after I graduated college. At that point, I didn't know what to do with myself and I didn't want to leave D.C. because I didn't have the motivation. I started interning at Folkways, and then a job opened up in the mail order department. It was [among] the most boring jobs [at Folkways], but it was cool because I had the opportunity to listen to large amounts of their catalog when I was at work; on the other side of my work area was the intern area, and I heard them listening to this album. I had stopped making "songs" the year before-- I was making atonal, arrythmic, structurally freer music in my basement in D.C., and it was all improvisational. I didn't think I would make "songs" again, but listening to that album made me want to tune my guitar back to standard tuning and play conventional melodies on it again.

"Tea Song" is the one that I still love. I listened to that song over and over again, showed it to all my friends, and wouldn't get over it for quite a long time. It's really just voice and guitar with not much other instrumentation, but songwriting-wise, it really spoke to me. I listened to a lot of the folk revival stuff from that period, and not much of it was interesting to me. Michael Hurley wasn't a part of that; I couldn't even see where he was drawing inspiration from in 1961, 1962-- I was shocked by the sound he was making. Michael Hurley had a really unique approach to songwriting. It was a really amazing thing to find in the Folkways catalogue.